Berta Sachs
Berta Sachs , née Bertha Sachs (born October 12, 1876 in Freising ; † November 27, 1943 in Zell , Lower Franconia , today part of Üchtelhausen ) was a German teacher, headmistress and pioneer of social work.
Live and act
She was the daughter of the king. High school professor Korbinian Sachs and his wife Babette Sachs, b. Steinecker. After attending the seven-class elementary school in Freising and (after the transfer of his father) in Munich, Sachs graduated from the “Königliche Kreislehrerbildunganstalt” in the latter city. At the time, the route through this training institution was the only way for women to gain education and social prestige as long as they were denied access to universities. She then worked as a teacher at various Bavarian elementary schools, in Erding and Munich, and was a member of the “Bavarian Teachers' Association”. She interrupted her school service, which Sachs did at elementary schools in Erding and Munich, for three years to take private lessons and attend the "private high school courses for girls", founded in 1900 by Adolf Sickenberger in Munich, who was also the head of the training institution, to prepare for the Abitur. Sachs took this as an external student at the Luitpoldgymnasium . In addition, in 1909 she obtained the state license to teach "higher girls' schools" and taught at the Lyceum of the Nuremberg women's school. From 1910, Sachs, who was a member of the “Association of Students Women”, studied history, German and geography at Munich University. From June 1911 she worked as a secondary school teacher at the higher girls' school in Nuremberg, Labenwolfstrasse 16, to which a women's school was also affiliated. Sachs continued her studies at the "Friedrich-Alexanders University" in Erlangen. There she received her doctorate in 1913 with a dissertation in history under Gustav Beckmann . The topic of her doctoral thesis was: “Plans and measures of the government of King Max I Joseph in the girls' school system of Old Bavaria. A contribution to the history of the Enlightenment in Bavaria ”. The doctoral candidate examined this epoch on the basis of the state archive material and grasped the changes in the school sector on a broader basis than the usual representations . In the foreword of her dissertation, Sachs wrote regarding the old and "higher girls' schools":
- Of course, the older girls 'schools, especially those that existed in old Bavaria at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, do not deserve the name' higher girls 'school', which only got a fixed content through the most recent ministerial decrees of the German federal states: In the elementary subjects they barely go beyond the goal of the elementary school and differ from it only in the use of the French language, a somewhat more extensive subject lesson and the 'beautiful' handicrafts compared to the merely 'useful' in industrial lessons at the elementary school. The expression 'higher girls' school ', when used from this period, has the meaning' school for girls of the higher classes ', just as today's higher girls' school has not yet shed the character of the class school.
In 1917, Sachs took over responsibility for the “Women's Seminar for Social Professional Work”, founded in 1913, which until then was headed by Rosa Kempf , with whom she sometimes lived together. Before that, she had already participated as a representative of the Frankfurt women's seminar at the first "Conference of Social Women's Schools", convened on January 24, 1917 in Berlin by Alice Salomon . The outgoing headmistress, who moved to the Düsseldorf "Sozialakadmie für Frauen", stated on the handover of the seminar:
- All experts among women agreed that there had to be an extensive reduction in women's labor, which had assumed unhealthy forms during the war. But all the preparations made in written disputes, at congresses and at the women's lectures at the War Offices were thrown overboard by the unfortunate outcome of the war, the outbreak of the revolution and the rapid flooding back of the Lord. In the last meeting of the school board and advisory board, Dr. Berta Sachs, senior teacher from Nuremberg, appointed as successor. I firmly hope that the seminar will be continued in the same spirit and with the same work as before, and that the Frankfurt and Düsseldorf institutes will prosper in this way through sisterly mutual contact .
Under Sachs leadership, the training center was one of the first in Germany to receive state recognition:
- The women's seminar was the first of all Prussian welfare schools to receive state recognition on April 12, 1919 ... It is thanks to the intensive work of the board of directors (executive chairman Prof. Dr. Polligkeit ) and the school committee that the former women's seminar for social professional work is under the new one The name of the welfare school for Hesse-Nassau and Hesse was able to continue to exist and was given greater development opportunities ... The reorganization helped it to create a spatially wide school district, which also included medium-sized and small towns with their rural communities and linked them much more to lively social practice was increased, a full-time teacher was hired, books and other teaching aids, even a photographic apparatus, procured, a medical examiner was hired for the students. Schoolgirls who struggled economically were created through tuition grants, school fee reductions, expansion of the existing schoolgirls' home, relief. A 4-month follow-up training course for carers from the province of Hessen-Nassau and the state of Hesse to obtain the state examination for welfare workers was held. There was a revival of the welfare school everywhere. She had safe ground again; The number of female pupils also decreased noticeably… The school had increasingly transformed itself into a provincial school in terms of the origins of its female visitors. While in 1924, when the school was reorganized, a third of the students had their home outside of Hessen-Nassau and Hesse, in 1932/33 of 68 students, 62, ie 92% from the school district ... Miss. Dr . Anne Broecker was appointed headmistress on March 17, 1933 in place of Dr. Berta Sachs, who had to retire for health reasons .
The headmistress was determined to ensure that male welfare workers were also admitted to the women's seminar in four-month follow-up training courses. The non-part-time courses were primarily geared towards the needs of administrative and welfare practice. The first course began on September 1, 1922. Others followed in 1927/1928 and 1929/1930. Sachs was a permanent member of the “Conference of the Social Women's Schools in Germany”, which campaigned vehemently for a standardization of social education, the “Conference of the Welfare Deputies of the Rhine-Main Economic Area” and the “ German Association for Public and Private Welfare ”. In addition to her responsible position as headmistress, Sachs was also involved in the women's movement, with a particular interest in women's employment. In an article for a women's magazine, she complained that in 1919 women's employment had fallen back to the pre-war level:
- All experts among women agreed that there had to be an extensive reduction in women's labor, which had assumed unhealthy forms during the war. But all the preparations made in written disputes, at congresses and at the women's lectures at the War Offices were thrown overboard by the unfortunate outcome of the war, the outbreak of the revolution and the rapid flooding back of the Lord. The daily increase in the number of unemployed by thousands led to a passionate struggle against women's labor as such. The most ruthless, most arbitrary dismissals of women by the relevant employee committees were the order of the day: it was not just the departure of the wives whose husbands had returned from the field and the daughters of the house who were not dependent on earnings, and the rejection of women in their previous occupations as tailors , Seamstress, maid; employers were forced by all means to fire all female employees, whether they were penniless or well-off, whether they had a family or were driven straight out into the street as a sleeper; Women were dismissed who did women's work in the true sense of the word or who were trained in difficult work areas without a reasonably usable replacement by male forces ... Whether the lot of the working woman, whether our lot will be bearable in the next years and decades, depends on the decision made over the next few days and weeks. Our fate is not only in the hands of our enemies, it is also in us, in our belief in our people, in the will to assert ourselves .
Sachs was buried in the forest cemetery in Munich.
Publications
- Plans and measures of the government of King Max I Joseph in the girls' school system of Old Bavaria. A contribution to the history of the Enlightenment in Bavaria, Munich 1914
literature
- Elisabeth Boedecker: Landmarks of the German women's movement from its beginnings in the 19th century to the new beginning after 1945, Hanover 1969
- Christl Knauer: Women under the influence of church and state. Higher girls' schools and Bavarian educational policy in the first half of the 19th century, Munich 1995
- Corina Mengden: The “women's seminar for social professional work” in Frankfurt / Main, Munich 2004 (unpublished diploma thesis)
- Elke Reining: Aspects of a biography: In memory of Rosa Kempf (1874–1948), in: Zeitschrift für Sozialreform, 1998 / No. 1, pp. 22-45
- Peter Reinicke: The training centers for social work in Germany 1899–1945, Berlin 2012
- The Faculty of Social Work and Health at the Frankfurt am Main University of Applied Sciences (ed.): Why only women? . 100 years of training for social professions, Frankfurt / Main 2014
- Hanna u. Dieter Eckhardt: Metha Quarck hammer blow. I'm radical to the bone. Eine Biographie, Frankfurt 2015, p. 168
Individual evidence
- ↑ cf. The Faculty of Social Work and Health at the Frankfurt am Main University of Applied Sciences, Frankfurt 2014, p. 45 f; see. Mengden 2004, Reinicke 2012, p. 236
- ↑ Knauer 1995, p. 15
- ↑ Sachs 1914, p. V
- ↑ Boedecker 1969, p. 10
- ↑ cit. n. Reining 1998, p. 38
- ↑ cit. n. Document, archived in the Ida-Seele archive
- ↑ Article archived in the Ida-Seele-Archiv
Web links
- http://frankfurter-habenlexikon.de/node/9943 with photo
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Sachs, Berta |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Sachs, Bertha (maiden name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German teacher, headmistress and pioneer of social work |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 12, 1876 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Freising |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 27, 1943 |
| Place of death | Zell am Main |